Trying to figure how things work in MotionBuilder’s Python editor is tough. Google and the SDK Help that comes along with MotionBuilder are great, but there is still more help out there – the “dir”! 🙂 What does “dir” do? The definition I was able to find is “It...

Here is a tool that I whipped up: Shelve It. It’s a simple Python script that will duplicate your current MotionBuilder take, name it using the original take’s name but add the suffix “_Shelved”. It can come in hand when you want to explore some more changes on a take...

I ran into a bug in my previous post about Plotting Selected properties – a bug that occurs in MotionBuilder 2015. I got in touch with Discreet and they said it would be easy enough for them to fix the bug in an update/hot fix, but I really wanted to...

Being able to run a Python script on all takes within a MotionBuilder scene is a powerful time saver. Below I’m going to show how I learned to create a layer on every take within a MotionBuilder scene using Python. We are going to use Python to create an Animation...

I ran the script I created in “Animating and setting keys with MotionBuilder’s Python Editor” and decided that I would use the scene it creates to learn how to plot on selected properties in MotionBuilder’s Python Editor. Update: I found a work around for the bug and it is covered in my...

Here is the code for a Python script that I wrote dealing animating and setting keys on a selected object within MotionBuilder. Writing this animation script really helped me get a better understanding on how to use MotionBuilder’s FBTime. The exercise forced me to sit down for about two hours...

Here is a script/tool I created for MotionBuilder using Python. This tool will do an incremental save of your scene. Why? Incremental saves are amazingly useful, I thought a tool that automates the process down to one click would be fun. A big thanks goes out to my college Raphael...

Let’s go over how to use Python to plot animation onto a character’s Control Rig. The interesting part of this is the “plot options” and how we call back on them when we plot. These are the settings I use when I am processing large motion capture data down...

In MotionBuilder using animation layers are great for edits, blending, additives and in general adding quality passes to your animations. So below I’m going to demo how I learned to add layers using Python. To create an Animation Layer on the Current Take script: Now let’s setup a Python Script...

Creating a simple marker in MotionBuilder using Python scripting. So here was a script that took some time for me. Changing the Look of the marker through Python had me stumped (luckily I had a friend who could help). Changing the color of the null/model was a long...